Onion beer bread

Onion bread fresh from the oven

After my first onion bread recipe, that you can find here, I was trying to hunt down another one that I could try and bake. I found this oneover here, that I slightly modified. I added some pumpkin seeds and replaced the water by beer. But the bread itself is very nice and fluffy and light, much like French “pain de campange” style bread. I also found a new way on how to fry onions without having to use too much oil or burning half of them. So only for this trick, the recipe is already so helpful… This bread also goes to Panissimo and for this we already got 3 breads there this month. I hope you guys from Panissimo, Barbara and Sandra, enjoy the bread as much as I do.

Sourdough:

• 45 g rye flour
• 45 g water
• 10 g sourdough starter

Dough

• Sourdough
• 360 g wheat flour
• 80 g rye fluor
• 5 g fresh yeast
• 10 g salt
• 320 g lukewarm beer
• 1 table spoon honey
• 1 diced onion

Mix the ingredients for the sourdough in a bowl, cover it up and let it rest for about 16 hours at 25°C. Now for the onions. Preheat the oven to 150°C. Lay out the diced onions in a baking tray. Sprinkle a bit of oil on top and mix the onions well through. Now pop the baking tray for 20 - 30 minutes in the oven. When taking it out, you can see the onions are evenly brown and.

Now put all ingredients in the mixing bowl and mix them well together. The dough is a bit soft and gluey. Let the dough rest for 30 – 45 minutes. During this, stretch and fold the dough once or twice.

We now form the bread. If you are not sure how to form / shape bread, please follow my link on "bread baking basics + know how". This is another one of my free formed bread and so, it has to rest in a form in order to not run flat on you. So normally you would put in a bread fermentation basket it you have one. This is a basket that bakers will let their breads ferment in for a while to get in form while fermenting. As I don't have a special basket for this, I am just taking a normal high bowl (I am still using the same on that I used when I made this bread) with a round bottom that gives my bread more or less the form that I desire for the bread. I flour the bowl well before I add the dough, this way later it won't stick to it. Now I add the formed dough bottom side up into the bowl. Let the bread ferment another 45 minutes (actually there is a finger test to check if the bread is ready for the oven or not. I will post this method another time because it’s really helpful at this stage).

Once the breads have been fermented, I drop them upside down from their bread baskets on my permanent Teflon baking foil on which I already sprinkled a bed of flour. Also sprinkle a layer of flour on top of the bread before putting in the oven. The oven should be pre heated on 250°C. Now pour a cup of hot water in the oven (if you do not have this inbuilt steaming program in your oven at home), pop the bread in the oven and also place a cup of water on the floor of the oven to give some additional steam later on. Quickly close the door so the hot steam will be caught within the oven. Having all that steam in the oven is, like mentioned many times before, extremely important for a scrumptious crust and a great consistency of the bread.

Bake the breads for 10 minutes like this until it reached the right brown color that you are looking for in a bread crust, then open up the door, let the steam out, lower the heat on 200°C and continue to bake the bread for another 45 - 50 minutes. Now switch off the heat, keep the door open and let the bread cool down slowly. I always spray a bit of water on top of the fresh loaf when it's still hot. It gives a nice and shiny surface the fresh baked crust.

Like always, I will try to post this self-made bread to the yeast spotting webpage like every time I am baking one as I thing this awesome blog event always deserves my support